If Trump is Caesar, who are Cassius, Brutus and Antonio in current US politics?

The prospect of a second Donald Trump victory in November’s US election has widely been seen – at least by liberal commentators –as an apocalyptic threat to democracy. Indeed, the coming election is sometimes framed as a binary clash between democracy and autocracy. Some have even cast Trump as a new Julius Caesar, whose re-election would strike a fatal blow to America’s republican institutions just as Caesar’s dictatorship paved the way for the autocracy of the emperors. As the Financial Times put it back in June: ‘Trump would resume office as an American Caesar with a ready-made toolkit of executive actions.’

Plenty of ink has been spilled on whether Trump is best described as Caesarist, populist, nationalist, fascist or something else. Yet this is often disconnected from American democracy’s own longue durée. The threat of the Caesarist leader has loomed in the American political imagination from the republic’s revolutionary beginnings, and only deepened as the US entered the age of industrial capitalism around the middle of the 19th century. A historical perspective can inform our grasp of contemporary political realities. While many Americans may be relieved at the nomination of Kamala Harris as Democratic candidate, a longer vantage suggests that American democracy will continue to wrestle with the problem that was once called Caesarism, at least until it goes further in resolving its staggering economic and social contradictions.